All the kings men, p.7
All the King’s Men, page 7
Many of these vagrant ex-soldiers were only too happy to return to the colours when the army doubled in size to provide troops to fight in Flanders and elsewhere in 1702. But as the war dragged on and more troops were required – 150,000 were serving Queen Anne in the field by 1709, though only half of them were British – it became increasingly difficult to find new recruits.7 One expedient was to sentence minor criminals to service in the army, and to release others if they volunteered. Another was for professional recruiters, or ‘crimpers’, to kidnap men from the streets and then sell them to recruiting parties (a practice akin to the naval press-gang). So unwilling were many such ‘volunteers’ that they were locked in gaols prior to being sent abroad.
Less heavy-handed tactics after Blenheim included recruiting parties using Marlborough’s fame to attract volunteers – one recruiting ditty, sung to the tune of ‘Waltzing Matilda’, included the refrain ‘who’ll come a-soldiering with Marlborough and me?’ Nonetheless, many of these parties had to resort to the type of tricks and machinations that Captain Plume and Sergeant Kite used in George Farquhar’s contemporary play The Recruiting Officer (1706). Farquhar himself had been a recruiting lieutenant for the Earl of Orrery’s Regiment of Foot, and the following speech, which he gives to Kite, has the ring of authenticity:
If any gentleman soldiers, or others, have a mind to serve Her Majesty, and pull down the French king; if any prentices have severe masters, any children have undutiful parents; if any servants have too little wages, or any husband too much wife; let them repair to the noble Sergeant Kite, at the Sign of the Raven, in this good town of Shrewsbury, and they shall receive present relief and entertainment.8
Even such oratory as this left the quotas unfilled, forcing the government to increase the already generous bounty from £2 a head in 1703 to £5 in 1708, and to pass no fewer than nine recruiting statutes during the course of the twelve-year struggle.9 Clearly military life remained deeply unpopular with society at large, an attitude summed up by the author Daniel Defoe when he noted (in descending order of preference): ‘In winter, the poor starve, thieve or turn soldier.’10 A contemporary newspaper, the London Spy, was even more derogatory when it noted the soldier was ‘generally beloved of two sorts of companion, in whores and lice, for both these Vermin are great admirers’.11
When the Earl of Marlborough arrived in the Low Countries to take command of English and Dutch troops in July 1702, he was already fifty-two years old (six years older than the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon at Waterloo) and keen to establish the military reputation denied him in his prime. He would face the same problem that confronts all commanders of polyglot forces: how to get his allies, in particular the Dutch, to agree to his strategy. This was no easy task for two interlinked reasons: the complicated nature of the United Provinces’ political system; and the fact that its political representatives liked to keep a close eye on military affairs.
Since breaking away from Spanish control in the early seventeenth century, the United Provinces had been governed by an elected estate headed by an official known as a pensionary. These estates in turn sent delegates to the States-General, the national parliament, where each province had a single vote. It was left to Holland, the largest and richest province, to provide the ‘grand pensionary’, the republic’s equivalent of a chief executive. He had day-to-day control of foreign affairs and also presided over the Council of State.
In 1702 the grand pensionary was (and had been for the previous fourteen years) Anthonie Heinsius, a sixty-year-old bachelor of ascetic tastes who lived for his work. His lifestyle could not have contrasted more with that of the Marlboroughs, who, now that they were high in the queen’s favour, were enjoying huge financial rewards.* Yet he appreciated Marlborough’s seriousness when it came to professional matters, and the close personal relationship they forged during the treaty negotiations would be one of the cornerstones of the Grand Alliance. Even Heinsius, however, had to defer all-important decisions to the States-General, where opinions were rarely united; and Marlborough’s hands would be further tied by the fact that each provincial estate elected deputies to accompany Dutch armies in the field. Though they held no military rank, their influence was immense and no Dutch general would fight if the field deputies did not want him to, regardless of the wishes of an Allied commander-in-chief.
The strategic situation in July 1702, moreover, was far from satisfactory. A year earlier the French had forced the Dutch to relinquish the barrier towns in the Spanish Netherlands – including Luxembourg, Mons, Namur and Oudenaarde – granted to them by the Treaty of Rijswijk, and on which the Dutch had pinned their long-term hopes of security. Louis XIV had followed this up in the late spring of 1702 by dispatching the able Marshal Louis Boufflers and 60,000 veteran troops to invade Holland itself. Boufflers had easily outmanoeuvred the Allied commander, Godard van Reede Ginckel, Earl of Athlone (ennobled by William III for his service in Ireland), and driven him back towards Nijmegen on the lower Rhine. Such was the parlous state of affairs when Marlborough took personal command of the now reinforced Allied Army at Nijmegen in the summer of 1702. It was comprised of 60,000 troops, only a quarter of whom were British; the remainder were Dutch (the largest contingent, though their regiments included many Scots and Swiss), Germans and Danes.
Marlborough at once sought to knock the French off balance by crossing the River Maas (Meuse in French) below Graves and threatening Boufflers’s lines of communication back to the Spanish Netherlands. He hoped that Prince Louis of Baden’s Imperial forces on the upper Rhine would put pressure on the French right. But before this plan of action could be agreed, Louis XIV ordered Boufflers to send a strong detachment to the upper Rhine, giving Marlborough a distinct numerical advantage. Even then the Dutch hesitated, so fearful were they of losing Nijmegen, causing Marlborough to write a forceful letter to Heinsius that concluded: ‘Till we act offensively, all things must go ill.’12
The letter had the desired effect, and on 22 July, with Dutch permission, Marlborough crossed the Maas and struck south-west towards Liège. A British sergeant recalled:
At night there was orders for the quartermaster general [William Cadogan, Marlborough’s principal staff officer], the vanguard and camp colour men to parade on the right of the front line by four o’clock in the morning and the General to beat at 5.00. Which orders were all punctually obeyed and the army decamped accordingly and that day passed the Maas and advanced about two and a half leagues [7½ miles] and there encamped. Whereupon the enemy decamped also.13
The sergeant describes a typical move for an early-eighteenth-century army. First the engineers would have bridged the Maas with pontoons for the troops to cross, while the guns, carts and heavy baggage crossed the existing bridge in Graves. The vanguard was led by Cadogan with a small cavalry escort, followed by units in order of seniority. Camp colourmen were guides from each battalion who carried flags to enable the commanding officers to identify their allocated campsite at the end of each day’s march.
Boufflers responded by crossing the Maas at Roermond, but in hurrying to get ahead of the Allied march he exposed his flank to a dawn attack. ‘Lord Marlborough had his men under arms,’ recalled Lieutenant Robert Parker, a Protestant from Kilkenny who had risen from the ranks in the Royal Regiment of Ireland (later the 18th Foot), ‘and just ready to march, when the Field-Deputies came to him, and prayed him to desist. This greatly surprised him, as they had agreed to his scheme the night before: but being a man of great temper and prudence, and being determined not to do anything this first campaign without their approbation, at their earnest treaty he desisted.’14
It would not be the last time the field deputies thwarted Marlborough’s plans. He had, nonetheless, achieved his broader objective – to force Boufflers to evacuate Dutch territory – and was now able to concentrate on retaking a number of key French-held towns, including Venlo and Liège (which fell by storm on 23 September and 23 October respectively). At the citadel of Liège, showing more courage than sense, the French commander had refused Marlborough’s terms of surrender and his soldiers paid the price. Parker confessed: ‘Our men gave no quarter for some time, so that the greater part of the garrison was cut to pieces.’15
Leaving part of his army to besiege the fortress of Rheinberg, Marlborough returned to England in triumph (though not without hazard, as the boat in which he was travelling down the Maas was stopped by French troops from Guelders and he was allowed to proceed only when his clerk produced an out-of-date passport). In barely three months he had removed the threat to Holland and cleared the Maas as far as Liège. His reward was a dukedom, yet the Tory majority in the House of Commons refused to grant him a suitable pension (on the grounds of cost) and insisted on twinning his congratulatory address with one saluting the navy’s successful action at Vigo Bay that had led to the capture of the Spanish treasure fleet. ‘By commending naval commanders alongside Marlborough,’ writes the duke’s biographer, ‘the Tories were making clear their preference for the “traditional” British strategy based on seapower, rather than on a Continental commitment.’16 It was a debate that would trouble Marlborough for many years to come as the government attempted to conduct Continental and maritime campaigns simultaneously – in Flanders and Spain – with the inevitable dispersal of military force that such a compromise strategy entailed.
5. The March to the Danube
The freshly minted Duke of Marlborough was still on leave in London, basking in the warm glow of public acclaim, when word reached him in mid-February 1703 that his only son, John, Marquess of Blandford, a sixteen-year-old undergraduate at Cambridge, was dangerously ill with smallpox. His wife rushed to her son’s bedside, but Marlborough saw no sense in both of them risking infection and sent physicians in his stead. ‘I am so troubled at the sad condition this poor child seems to be in,’ he wrote soon after to the duchess, ‘that I know not what to do. I pray God to give you some comfort in this great affliction. If you think my coming can be of the least use let me know it.’1
For thirty-six hours, Marlborough waited anxiously for news of his son’s recovery. But it never came and, fearing the worst, he travelled to Cambridge and was at the bedside when Blandford died in the morning of 20 February 1703. A grief-stricken Marlborough threw himself with even more energy than usual into the new campaigning season, and by the autumn of 1703 had captured Bonn, Huy and Limburg. But other, more ambitious plans had come to naught, thanks to a combination of Dutch caution, incompetence and in-fighting: notably his ‘Great Design’ to seize the port of Antwerp; and his attempts to pierce the incomplete French defensive system known as the Lines of Brabant so that he could engage Boufflers and his colleague, Marshal François Villeroi, in open battle. Meanwhile, further south, his ally Emperor Leopold I of Austria was under threat from two directions: from Hungary, recently wrested from Turkish rule, where unpopular Austrian taxation had provoked an uprising; and from Bavaria, the most powerful state in southern Germany, which had switched sides to join France at the start of the year. What made this betrayal doubly shocking was that Bavaria’s ruler, the Elector Maximilian, was the emperor’s son-in-law and had served him as governor-general of the Spanish Netherlands during the previous war. A ruthlessly ambitious man, Maximilian hoped to replace Leopold as Holy Roman Emperor and saw an alliance with France as the means. His first act was to capture the free city of Ulm on the Danube, thus threatening Vienna and opening up a new front deep in Germany that the French were quick to support. By the end of the year the Franco-Bavarian forces had overwhelmed a smaller Imperial army at Höchstädt, and had taken the fortresses of Ratisbon on the Danube, Augsburg on the Lech and Landau near the Rhine.
With Austria in danger of being knocked out of the war, Count Wratislaw, the emperor’s ambassador in London, spent the winter of 1703/4 pleading with Marlborough to march an army south from Holland to relieve the pressure. Mindful of the logistical difficulties and the inevitable Dutch opposition, his initial response was non-committal. But at last he relented, telling Wratislaw that it was his intention ‘to induce the Estates-General to decide upon a siege of Landau, or a diversion on the Moselle’, and that if he was successful in taking Landau he would supply Prince Louis of Baden, the Imperial commander on the upper Rhine, ‘with as many troops as possible to enable him to overthrow the Elector of Bavaria’.2
In the event, both Prince Louis and the Dutch preferred to limit the offensive to the Moselle Valley and a simultaneous assault on Landau, whereas Marlborough and Prince Eugène of Savoy,* the most talented and aggressive Imperial commander (and a man who had won important victories over the French in Italy in the first year of war, 1701), favoured a march all the way to the Danube. Mindful of the need to tread carefully, it was not until 18 April that Marlborough outlined his strategy, and his plan to overcome Dutch opposition, in a letter to his close friend Lord Godolphin, the first lord of the Treasury:†
My intentions are to march all the English to Koblenz, and to declare here that I intend to command on the Moselle; but when I come there to write to the States[-General], that I think it absolutely necessary for saving the Empire to march with the troops under my command to join those in Germany that are in her Majesty’s and Dutch pay, in order to take the measure with Prince Louis for the speedy reducing of the Elector of Bavaria. The army I propose there would consist of upwards of 40,000 men. If I should act in any other manner … my design would immediately be known to the French, and these people [the Dutch] would never consent to let so many troops go so far from their frontiers.3
Only Heinsius and Lieutenant-General Johan van Goor, the Dutch commander who had lately been serving under Prince Louis, were told the truth. With good reason, because Marlborough’s secret plan was extremely hazardous. It required a flank march along the eastern borders of France, with an ever-lengthening line of communication that would be vulnerable to a French counter-attack. It meant crossing great rivers, many of them unbridged, and marching across 250 miles of wooded, hilly and poorly tracked country. And all the while Marlborough would have to feed, water, shelter and move an army of 40,000 soldiers – a third more than the population of Bristol, then the largest city in England after London – with its size growing to 60,000 after other contingents had joined the line of march.
It helped that his quartermaster-general, William Cadogan, was a man of outstanding ability whose roles included master logistician, chief of intelligence and commander of the advance guard. And never were his talents put to better use than during the march to Bavaria when he and his staff had to help Marlborough ‘plot the line of march, and select suitable places for nightly camps; arrange for the baking of bread, the army’s staple ration; set up depots along the line of march to be stocked ahead of the army’s arrival with food and other supplies – even fresh shoes to replace those worn out by marching’. They also had to hire the army’s transport of 1,700 wagons and 4,000 draught animals, collect boats to move heavy supplies up the Rhine, and arrange sufficient fodder for 19,000 horses, all the draught animals and the beef ration on the hoof. The fodder alone amounted to 100 tons of oats a day.4 To pay for all this, and to ensure his men received their wages in full and on time (and were, as a result, less inclined to loot), Marlborough would take with him closely guarded coffers of gold, known collectively as the Military Chest. The coffers were ‘guarantors of good will and fine order during a manoeuvre that, by its nature, promised extreme fatigue and continuous stress’.5
Finally, after much frantic preparation, the epic march began at Bedburg, west of Cologne, at first light on 20 May 1704.
Marlborough took with him an army of 21,000 men (more than 14,000 of whom were British and Irish, many recently recruited), and was joined by a further 5,000 Prussians and Hanoverians when he reached Coblenz, on the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine, on the 26th. It was here that the French, and indeed most of his own soldiers, expected him to turn along the northern bank of the Moselle towards France. But instead, after a two-day halt, and ‘to the surprise of all’, according to one of his officers, ‘we crossed the Moselle and Rhine both at this place, and marched through the country of Hesse-Cassell, where we were joined by the Hereditary Prince of that country with a body of Hessians, which completed the Duke’s army to about 40,000.’6
Thus far Marlborough’s march had been shadowed to the west by a French army under Marshal Villeroi. When the Allies did not follow the Moselle, but instead crossed the Rhine, Louis XIV and his advisers assumed their true objective was to recross further south at Philippsburg – where another bridge-of-boats was, on Marlborough’s orders, in the process of being constructed – so that he could recapture Landau and invade Alsace. To prevent this, Louis ordered Villeroi to continue his march south to Landau, where he would link up with a separate French army from Strasbourg under Marshal Tallard. But the bridge-of-boats at Philippsburg was a ruse and the French would not discover Marlborough’s true intention until he crossed the River Main on 3 June. By then it was too late for either marshal to prevent him from linking up with Louis of Baden.
And all the while, thanks to Cadogan’s brilliant organization, the march went like clockwork. To save time, Marlborough had left his heavy guns behind, and all vital stores and the remaining guns – mostly 3- and 6-pounders, supported by mortars and howitzers – were transported as far as possible in river barges, and then in specially designed carts. The rest of the army marched in two columns: the horse in one, accompanied by Marlborough himself; the infantry in the other, led by Marlborough’s younger brother, General Charles Churchill. Each day they left their camping grounds at first light and completed their march by nine in the morning, before the sun got too hot. This way the soldiers were able to cover 12–14 miles a day, but also conserve their energies, and those of their draught animals and horses. Lieutenant Parker wrote:
